be kind, rewind!

superplough We didn't have this saying in Australia. We had "Don't be an a#$hole, rewind"

GOOD. That means I'll never have to experience that again either! It sucked.

Kano Animation We didnt have a saying, we had to pay for a "rewind service". We are Dutch, after all.

omg yes that was so frustrating !!!!

lol - so true!

Unfortunately for me, the teachers always played crap like Barney which the rest of my class seemed to enjoy. All I could do is sit there and think, "What the hell is wrong with you people." I also use to get in trouble for not wanting to watch Barney or take naps with the rest of the class.

I think kids still dont care. They just wanna see movies or bill nye in class

While giggling with your best buddy and making fun of virtually anything , which would eventually get you in trouble.

Amen.

Squeezing the vhs out of the box with the blockbuster plastic on it is the best feeling in the world

I loved recording over favourite content. 😎

Did you ever record over rented movies? 😆 I never did, but it was tempting.

Ahhh the good ole days. I understand jeff. As my buddy told me once: it's not the convenience that we miss necessarily... it's the nastalgia .

My man!

Yep 👍 Know what you mean

I still have many VHS tapes and quite a few of the plastic cases. Since I store my tapes in boxes but love the cases, I use the cases as storage boxes. I can make that sound any time I want... Beautiful sound for VHS fans.

We've gotten spoiled haven't we

@@shinyhorse8045 Im 42 and yes..spoiled to the core but when you watched vhs tapes in very bad condition even for.. mm 1990 i remember that i started to curse a lot.. jajaaa.

I know... As if.

@SlowHandMcQueeg I'm 41, my grandparents at that time had some beta tape and no it wasn't soooooooooooo much better, it was just slightly better but not by much, I remember. If I'm not mistaken 8-bit guy has a comparison vid between vhs and beta on his channel and pretty much confirms my argument and drills your into the ground. So stfu with hyperbolic BS.

I grew up in the 70s watching hockey on a 13" B&W T.V. with rabbit ears. Now I can't change the channel fast enough if I end up on a non-HD channel by mistake on my 65" 4K. Like you said, we accept what we have.

And finding that your movie was not there.

I completely agree ! It was so fun going to the rental store for VHS and video games! I was too young back then to go in the adult section lol.

Straight to the horror section! ;)

unless the person before you failed to rewind it

@@wannabeetiger i wish i could go back to those days again, back when there was no internet, wi-fi, Instagram and iphones

@Jeric White huh?

Good old days, renting VHS movies based on the covers 😂

@@danimcfly5992 haha yeah!! Luckily though for me I've got my mate lol he's obviously not got a full shops worth but one of his livingroom walls is just VHS and it's a big room! So many I have never even heard of!

Is it the Nerd?

@@mr.berardine1694 lol sadly not

Streaming isn't higher quality that DVD/Blu-Ray/4K.

@@scottandrewhutchins Streaming is MUCH higher quality than DVD, what are you streaming 480p?

@@BatmanisBatman Most streaming sources don't have the lossless sound quality of BD (e.g. DTS MA); eventually this may change.

LCD screens were better only on resolution and size/weight against CRTs, everything else (color, contrast, brightness, viewing angle, response time) got much worse and things are only catching up now

DVD was not clearly best: lines horizontal lines than VHS and first generation of videos were not that good.

​@Ken Lompart They actually did have DVD recorders, but I don't think they were too common.

I loved DVDs because I was (and still am) a film nerd and the directors commentary blew me away. I loved hearing the filmmakers and actors talk about the film

@@SpongeSebastian They did but were expensive and needed a writable DVD which were also expensive, they gradually became common and cheaper but we were moving onto sd cards and usbs.

The only reason I don't still use VHS is because when our old TV broke (it was one that had the player built in) my Dad threw out all our old tapes.

True VHS takes up a lot of space but it’s still better than collecting DVDs.

May those unskippable intros, "piracy bad"-clips and overly animated menus rest in hell.

In 2030 we will have holodecks. We'll be part of the movie. You will actually be able to experience the hoverboard from BTTF2.

It will be 2080 and I'll probably still have my VHS tape collection if every single one of them manages to stay intact and not get destroyed in some kind of flooding or house fire.

Netflix: Was as bad as we remember?

Yeah, just give it some more time & we'll be nostalgic for dvds & Blu-rays, once they're obsolete. I know i'm gonna hold onto mine. I will never accept streaming. I want a physical copy of a movie or tv show, to own.

Screen have a lot to do with it, a small CRT across the room is miles away from massive 40+ inch LCD or a modern disk top monitor in terms of display.

Piracy advertisement?

@@DinoNuggies4665 They mean the FBI warnings about piracy before the movie.

VHS was much better for cartoons anyway, they look just fine, the picture quality only really starts to look bad with live action, and even that's only because we're now playing these tapes on flat screens 5 times bigger than anything they were designed to be played on

you guys are probably native english speakers so maybe did not care so much. But another great advantage of DVDs was being able to choose your audio language and subtitle tracks, which is a big leap as well if you live in a country with systematic and not always nice audio dubbing.

I guess it was inevitable, people are nostalgic for their childhood and it's a reaction against the overly crisp, digital images we're used to nowadays

@@rorz999 it proves once again that more, isn't necessarily better

You mostly notice these artifacts and imperfections on modern screens because they aren't designed to display this type of content/signal to begin with, lol. A 720p video on a 4k screen will look like crap but a 480p video on a 2k CRT will look waaaaay better and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Try usenet no fbi warnings no commercials.

You had to manually rewind it every time. There were so many limitations to VHS-don't kid yourself into thinking it was any good.

A simpler time

OldClam5 VHS was a pain with all the rewinding and so on I admit. But there were many movies out on video that have yet to be released on dvd, or versions that have been released but have had scenes edited out. So unless you’ve kept a version of the movie on Video of which you can get transferred to a dvd, it could be hard work trying to find a version, or an original version of what you’re looking for.

lol, you guys are just lazy. When I was a kid I would let it rewind and choose the next movie to watch to pass the time.

Happened to a very dear recording from 2003 here. It frazzled a good 10 seconds of it - I thankfully was able to save the rest. Cause: a plastic pillar that had come loose and decided it wouldn’t catch onto the tape. Instead of just rejecting it, the tape was already out, fully exposed and it got caught in the rest of the mechanism as it ejected. So much fun. I took for granted that it would happen eventually. Got a new machine, top of the bill late 2007 build, and have been happy since 👍 as for the precious tape: it comes out at special occasions only 😂

@@gjrrr2968 It might be a worthy investment to have it transferred and copied onto a DVD. You can still keep the tape.

I had a cheep player from 1989 for over 10 years and it never damaged a tape

That’s cause you were a poor. Just make more money. Duh

yep

Me too. I was not impressed with the whole DVD transition

Me too! It has that feel that DVD can't reproduce.

Me too, I like the old VHS quality.

They really could go the way of records, going by these comments!

@@le_plane I never liked DVD, it just felt worse. Bluray is what changed the game.

Same here

Both my kids are growing up with VHS

Thats fine , tape what you like . The only thing is the resolution sucks . Colors bleed with technology tv that we have . I had in the early 2000 a DvD recorder that used blank discs the same way as tapes but you couldn't tape over them . I used to reuse the spool to hold all the discs that had 2 - 3 movies on each one . You can find old machines and I know where one is that Im willing to swap with the owner since they only use it to watch movies.

just started collecting myself. as part of growing up in the 90s / 2000s, Family never had $ to rent @ blockbuster so now I have over 100 titles & play them everyday every hour once i'm home.

@@andrewyi4477 I might have driven a couple family members crazy by playing old Leslie Nielsen movies over and over for days on end..

That's because standard TV resolutions hadn't changed a bit since the NTSC standards were put in place in the early '50s. It was only with the rise of digital that things started to get shaken up.

LaserDisc was better, however the players cost too much for most people and very few places rented discs.

Some people certainly were, there is a reason Criterion Collection sold 100+ dollar laserdiscs.

Smoky Doggg Well the focus was just getting a copy of the movie. Even crappy tape copies would do.

It started with the LP sized Lazer Disk. I can rem watching Star Trek (wanna say it was III) in a department store, the disk was rather beautiful, I rem hitting the Eject Button and this glorious shiny rainbow reflecting thing smoothly slid out.

Not if said 4 year old ruffian figures out how to get to the tape and gives it a good old yank! Like I did....my father was most annoyed.😆

YEP!

I had a dedicated rewinding machine!

$.50 in my area.

More like a fine.

My local movie store had to stop charging because literally nobody rewinded the movies. I did, because I'm not a fucking lazy twat. But most people around here just didn't bother. It always sucked when I used to rent a movie and had the rewind the damn thing.

There were the odd enthusiasts that were into Laserdiscs at the time. I knew no one personally that had any but my high school music teacher had a Laserdisc player for the classroom upon which we watched West Side Story. That always struck me as hilarious, not only having a machine that not a lot of people own but also a movie that not lot of those people would probably buy for it. :)

I had a laserdisc player with about a dozen or so movies, and they did have a somewhat higher video quality than VHS, plus CD-quality digital sound. The biggest selling point for me at the time was that they tended to be letterboxed, showing the full width of the movie, while VHS versions tended to use the severely cropped "pan & scan" format. Eventually, DVDs hit the scene, which had a slightly higher quality than the analog-video laserdisc.

Beta had better quality than VHS, Beta only lost because of its shorter duration tapes. Oh, and Laser Disk had the best quality for home use at the time.

I have some Laserdiscs now but they're more for just novelty. I only paid a couple bucks for each, two of them being Ghostbusters I & II. :) The overwhelming majority of my video collection is VHS and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm not all that hung up on picture quality when it comes to old movies. I've seen enough classics remastered in high-def to know I don't want to see all the imperfections in props, costumes, makeup, and sets that we never used to pick up on in SD being exposed. Hell, I have several obscure movies that never received DVD reissues so there's not many other ways to view them outside of videotape.

Bad Blu-ray Disc, also 4K, is very fuck and is dead.

Welcome to the club. I snap up any decently priced tapes that interest me. You can find interesting things on old recorded tapes.

Same!! I feel like I lived through the last part of the VHS era. It kinda began to die around early 2000s. But I still remember watching cartoons as a kid on them!!

Same. I was born in 1999. We still had a vhs up until 2008. I specifically remember watching The Little Mermaid and rewinding it back in the mid 2000’s.🥹

i hated it and now it takes even longer since there are so many more options streaming.

Yep, and getting 1 or 2 NES games while I was there. Lots of fun.

@@zipzip8239 Meditate. Get fresh air. Listen to birds.

@@BabeTheAstrologer why?

@Coo Chi its not about being lazy, its about wasting my life trying to decide what to watch.

Corona virus would have spread faster back then.

Hmm... 🤔 I'll keep my Netflix. 😂

Oh really?

Television screens are a series of dots like pixels watching a VHS tape on say a 14'' the picture quality was reasonable but change it to a big tv say a 25--29'' then you will notice the difference, do not sit to close it looks ok but get in close the picture quality is not as good, i am not sure if the dots ( sorry i can remember the correct name ) varied between say a cheap tv and a higher quality tv.

I don't like streaming services, so luckily i don't have to experience opening the netflix app. I do enjoy popping in a BD though, retains part of the VHS era. ^^

It was always a little worse than TV.

Thats cause TVa were also bad . And let's be honest you didn't know what 4k was yet . You didn't actually see anything better until years later .

@Coo Chi lots of people care... hence the market for 4k tvs....

@Coo Chi oh dear... you have an extra chromosome don't you? You poor thing .

@Coo Chi You said something stupid I'm gonna tell you you said something stupid lol. Do you even know where you are right now ?

@@silvafox07 TVs were indeed bad back then. They were bulky and weighed as much as a bag of bricks.

It makes sense because the MCA/Universal Home Video pressing of BTTF was from 1994, the same year Jurassic Park made its home video debut. I had that same VHS copy before I upgraded to the 2002 DVD BTTF Trilogy Pack

stoopidmonkeyful - You didn't get it...did you?

Olly Dean in the 1940s there where no vcr players

What? That has nothing to do with anything discussed here.

Ridj some of the Looney tunes VHS tapes are not cheap on eBay

That sounds so unbelievably creepy.

@@Whiteboykun only a creep would think like that

when life was simple

I've already seen some people saying that there's a "flat spot" in the history of archiving broadcast TV around the end of VHS and the start of modern "Smart" formats (or just big enough hard drives to save loads of video to). I think there were DVD Recorders back in the day, but people just wanted "a DVD player" and got the cheapest one, without recording. There were hard drive based "boxes" for the likes of Sky TV, but they only had limited space and deleted old stuff automatically, also people didn't record the ads / news / other interesting bits and pieces, only shows and movies, which you can get on DVD anyway.

@@michaelmartin9022 not all history is worth saving. I think we'll all get by without spacejam and Clinton trial commercials.

NO .. People were NOT recording Off of a TV .. They were recording OFF AIR Stop it with that nonsense.

+Dan Livni-They sure didn't have the audio quality either. . .Or the durability. . .Over time, the more you used VHS tapes, the more you destroyed the film inside of it to where it eventually became slowly degraded. . .unusable. . .Fortunately, and through a sheer miracle, despite that we owned our own massive library of VHS tapes (which I wish we still had even today :D, I'd definitely want to hold on to them. . .), very few of our tapes ever suffered that problem. And between eight people in the entire house, our tapes were ALWAYS in heavy rotation, rewinding, fast forwarding, and rewinding all the way back to the beginning. . .Especially because we only had one major tv system throughout the entire house, and one tiny tv/vcr player in the bedroom, so every moment you could claim the vcr player for yourself was utterly indispensable. :D. The VCR players were often far more unreliable than the tapes, for us, they would often jam, or one of my nightmares, occasionally spit out the tape where the entire film was left unspooled, broken, and completely unusable. Despite all their problems and unreliability. . .I still do miss VHS players/tapes and had a hard time getting used to the emergence of DVDS. (And now I just mainly stream everything in an instant online, and pause, rewind, and fast forward with the click of a mouse. ..) Despite their problems, they were great for the time they were in. They were the absolute best we had at the time. Like every piece of technology throughout time, each new successors get far better with time. Improve from their predecessors to where probably even in the next even five years, streaming (or whatever will come after streaming and Blu ray) will become even better. The quality has vastly improved so much within the last 20 years between vhs, then dvds, then blu ray and streaming (and video recording making way to dvr, which made way to clicking with a button on your remote, to just an internet streaming feed), that I wouldn't be able to go back to using tapes. If I had to, I would use them again. It's so far ingrained in muscle memory, I definitely know how to still use them, but I really wouldn't like them as much anymore and see far more of the flaws I wasn't able to as a kid. . .But I am forever glad we had vhs as a kid. . .

"Rewound" is not a word.

@@111highgh always someone tryin to be a KZfaq spell cop. 😂

@Mr. A I'm not even going to acknowledge your existence.

So add it in the dictionary

Hold this L... and sit on it. _I just gave you a chair, have fun._

I had a toy raceway that would rewind tapes.

Block Buster was awesome. Going to the store, arguing with your parents over the wildly overpriced snacks. As a kid, it was exciting seeing all those tapes on display and picking one out. There's just something about actually handling all the boxes that you don't get picking with movies on prime.

Still burned into my head

I couldn't smell anything because of my tears

Krzysztof Czarnecki Me!

I used to just love smelling the inside of the clear plastic cover on the white plastic Disney movies boxes talk about a gateway drug weed has helped me cope

Too young to remember the “new cassette smell”

Well you won't ever get to use VHS again anytime soon

@@stephensnell1379 except if they get their hands on a VHS player (which are pretty cheap nowadays)

What move title

I remember the first VHS film on a machine in 1981 Superman 2 . At the time I was on rough times and still owned a B/W tv and color was nice to watch but this made me think of all the movies and tv shows I would buy when I got mine which wasnt till 1986 and that vhs machine cost $300 steep for the time . Bought it at Wards on monthly charges .

Mk Amen

Same for 8bit to 32/64bit videogames. Much better in CRT with no progressiva scan and with scanlines.

And that capture devices typically aren't that great. DVD recorders are generally pretty good for VHS captures though.

Not just that but the crt you have makes the difference. 20” and below are perfect for vhs. Anything above that really isn’t ideal. Another thing is cables. My vcr has svideo and component out which are lightyears ahead of composite and rf.

@@gavinp5940VHS doesn’t benefit from those higher quality connections (S-video / component) because it’s encoded in composite.

Party time, excellent!

Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player

The old VCRs were heavy as they were full of individual components. Latter ones were far more integrated and therefore lighter. The older ones were not more reliable.

I do, and yes they're quite a bit heavier compared to VHS cassettes from the early 2000's. However, there are some improvements in the newer ones and I think it's safe to say they're not much worse terms of video quality, perhaps even better.

Michael Davidson I have a portable vcr player

Thanks, that's a cool fact. I have about 250 VHS tapes laying around, and I noticed how some tapes are a lot heavier than others, even though their runtime is shorter. Never thought about how they developed them lighter over time.

I heard some stories of people doing music masters on hi-fi vhss

@@TheWeirdAlley You could, and get a rich analog sound. Some late model JVC units had no head switching noise, those were fantastic.

@@frankcoffey I know right, it's like a budet reel to reel

I absolutely love VHS for audio. It has become my favourite medium! Really nice warm analogue sound

PAL has more bandwidth to store colors since it was designed after color video was introduced. NTSC had to pigeonhole the colors into to pre-existing B&W setup. It lead to a whole bunch of NTSC oddities, buy they were implemented so that everything would be backwards compatible on pre-color TV sets.

Also it's spelled "colour" in PAL regions

PAL is 25fps and NTSC is 29.97fps. There are 50 fields every second for PAL and 60 fields per second for NTSC.

Color was the reason NTSC dropped from solid 30 fps to 29.97.

ya, i used to play the PSOne and PS2 games on CRT with Composite in early 2000's. The PAL games (especially Gran Turismo 3 A-Spec) looked much better in PAL compared to the NTSC.

Same

aperson22222 it's because they were the latest technology we had back in the day. I remember when vcr's were hundreds of dollars lol

You also remember the humongous(for the time) 36" CRT TV being the holy grail of entertainment. 36" and 2 billion pounds(sure felt like it) of pure, grainy entertainment.

and the standard TV screen being 19"

ya the shift in technology isnt noticed when its progress forward, tv always looked presentable as it evolved, but going back in time you could see how poor it really was. as a kid i grew up on married with children for example. watching it as it aired all episodes "looked" the same. but rewatching them now you can see the quality changes over each season. i think the same applies to mono sound in tv vs stereo. the change wasnt super noticable unless you had the better equipment and watched some media of lower tech. i think we can all agree when we flipped to digital broadcast the change was so big its impossible to go back. sparking the decades of "remastered" media to make watching tolerable. i do miss snow tho. was so much easier to watch a tv show with a little static than as it is now, where any loss of signal turns into a blocky unwatchable mess.

Joe Mieszczur Well only 1920eds film reel work on the moon so NASA can,t go back 😋 but robots on Mars have such limitations so you need such robots to help you with your blocks

You're so lucky mate

@@futuresocieties. golden days mate.

What happened to your mum?

@@adventureguy4119 my mum died about 4 years ago. When i went back to attend the funeral and help clear her belongings, she still had a ton of old VHS video's stored in boxes, including a load of promotional tapes. She was watching and enjoying the tapes until the end.

@@mightymightyironhead My condolences to your family for your mother. I grew up in late 1980s Yugoslavia (born in Australia though) and I grew up on VHS as my uncle had access to bootleg tapes. I still use VHS to this day (still have three working VCRs which I keep clean by using cleaning cassettes and isopropyl alcohol cleaning fluid). Your memories with your mother are special - cherish them dearly.

I also got to work in that same library a couple years later while we digitized and sent everything to storage while the lab itself was torn apart and redesigned as offices and study rooms.

Well 5 years in teenage years is a LOT

5 years is the difference between someone who is at their high school prom and someone who is a new hire at Goldman Sachs, has a Masters degree in a combined program, or a Sergeant(E-5) in the US Army or an Officer O-1!

87 - child 92 - full grown adult 😂

All I remember is how bad every news broadcaster looked when they upgraded to HD quality, that much is for sure.

Cool pic,max headroom brings back memories

@@robertmcmahon4549 Yes. If there's one tv show that would need to be rebooted, it's Max. They'd just have to change the tv stations into social media outlets. It would work now just as fine as it worked back then, maybe even better, with all the 80s nostalgia and dystopian cyberpunk craze going on.

@@ShootAUT yeh i watched him recently and it doesnt look like its aged

@@robertmcmahon4549 Exactly.

actually beta was better however way too expensive for consumers

@@mctv6486 Beta was indeed better, but vhs' aggressive marketing paid off

Laserdisc was a thing

Beta had better picture quality, but VHS blank cassettes had longer recording time, which was the seller for VHS....also porn went with VHS

My thoughts exactly! I don't recall sitting there thinking, "Oh, man, this really sucks!" while watching a VHS tape. However, something that I did notice was how easily VHS tapes and VCRs could be worn out.

That's true, because then a copy of a movie was really special. I remember when I got Toy Story as a kind. I watched it, rewinded it, and watched it again. Nowadays we are overloaded with movies throught netflix and prime

we rented moviebox (vhs unit in transportable bag with handle) and chuck norris movies. if you notice at home that the previous renter hadn't reversed the tape you would rant about it. after watching a movie me and my brother would ask who of us that got to reverse the vhs tape. we also competed with switching channels on the tv, mind you sweden had only 2 channels. the whole family watched tv and movies together.

Not necessarily, Michi, because we can get the physical copies in HD on Blu-ray Disc.

I remember watching Gremlins on my '98 tv set

A lot of that has to do just with younger age. Everything just seemed more fun :)

I miss having to reset the tracking on VHS!

if you have a high end vcr and tape there won;'t ve imperfections. and yes it is simpler because it was well thought out

@@AlisonBryen high end vcrs did auto tracking so you always had great picture quality!

As a kid, I never really noticed. It was the "norm" back then. lol.

They were also high speed duped.

I have hundreds of VHS tapes that I still watch and most of them are 6 or 8-hour tapes, so that's a lot of footage!

Rusty Shackleford when did VCR where discontinued

Me too, it's fun getting some friends together and watching a VHS movie on an old TV. There's just something inherently fun about experiencing old tech with your friends, especially if you have some nostalgia attached.

Stephen Seehorn I check out a VHS tape from the library one time called wakko's,wish and it almost mess up my vcr player because the tape is old

I still record new footage to VHS for nostalgia and convenience. Sometimes I record an entire season of shows from Netflix to a single tape and watch it off the tape.

I have the 1080p version. In my opinion I think VHS looks worse over HDMI than AV. I think HDMI allows you to see more flaws in the image than AV. However, most of the tapes I have I got from thrift stores and eBay, so I'm sure they had been played quite a lot. The DVD playback is great though it does a good job at upscaling the picture.

@@porkermurns7590 You know it might be down to my display. I'm using an old Samsung plasma as my main display. One of the reasons I bought it at the time was for how well it handled standard def material. It's not perfect, of course, but the HDMI signal gets rid of the color-bleed and inherent noise from an analog RCA signal. But you still have the sub-par, almost monochromatic, color at times. And flickering.

Yea. Hell that's why I bought the Original Trilogy on vhs a couple of months ago. I rather watch Star Wars that way because that gives me a more warm nostalgic feeling plus all the cgi on my Blu Rays are complete eyesores

In the old days, you could record a TV show for a friend or neighbour and give them the tape. In the late 90s I actually traded tapes with people far away - I copied and sent my rare recordings and they sent me theirs. Can't do that now - there's no easy way to get the recording off the digital TV box!

That's so cool

I agree. Hey remember when McDonalds would sell movies. I remember buying Back to the future for like 6 bucks new. I forgot what other movies were sold but I think it was a deal with Universal so they only sold movies from them.

I don't think we stopped caring about this.

Hello there and greetings. You guys must also be from a place we called the 90s. Where times were simpler. The world while not perfect seemed a lot more pleasant. And human beings actually interacted with each other. If you guys know how to go back there could you let me know?

@@TombstoneChris You just interacted with two guys you don't even know. Not bad these modern days.

ChrisS82 if you just watch the video, there is a movie shown that will help get you back to the 90s if you go 88 mph.

That shrink wrap was a tell tale sign it was resealed... he bought a used copy

I do

I used them in elementary school even though they were already outdated

Cool, gotta love Disney plus, it’s the best thing out there! 👍

Brandon Ly Don’t need to record stuff, when you can just search it up on the internet.

True, but the feeling was different. See something I liked, pop a tape in and press record. Watch it later. With camcorders nowadays, sometimes people want it on bluray, DVD, or online. All of those formats require transcoding. Back then, plug the camera into the VCR, press record, and share. Do edits on dedicated equipment later if desired.

Not everything is on the internet.

I’m guessing Nostalgia is somewhat blinding you on the past. VHS wasn’t a perfect format & the introduction of DVDs demonstrated that the public was asking more than what VHS could offer by the turn of the millennium.

I have several SVHS decks which not only have s-video but also component outputs. These units have a TBC built in as well. These work great for capturing the old tapes directly to a hard drive using a capture card. The main drawback on the higher end decks is they only playback SP recordings.

Terry, thanks for that insight. Also, isn't it true that the professionals would having used Betacam, not pro-grade VHS tapes? I remember using pro-grade VHS for school projects, but when I interned at a local TV station (this was in 1995), it was all Betacam. Were there actually professional applications of VHS? If so, what would the rationale have been behind using them?

Yeah... sadly the DVD rewinders didn't really catch on, did they? ;) (Yes... they actually made them. Even as dumb as it sounds)

Paddan You've got to be kidding... right?

I owned one. It saved wear and tear on the much more expensive player, and worked much faster. Biggest problem with mine was it was cheap, and broke after not a huge amount of use. Another advantage was you could pop in another tape and play it immediately without waiting for the rewind to happen.

The rewinder is a must have during that time. Saves times and prolong your VCR life from mechanical failures. I've the cheap one that did not have any counter in it, so it can't be used to (re-)wind the tapes into specific 'play back time'.

Playing tapes on a VCR dozen't cause much damage. It's the rewinding and fast forward that cause them to break down.

Early 70s too...

WerewolfLord VHS came out in the US in 1977.

NO It Came Out in 1976 in the US and Beta came in 1975

Chloie Kwirant hhhhjjhhdjdkdlksjhxzkxk"zkjhhxhgxgzgdhggxhzjkkskkzhbhzhzkzhxjjzjzvvjdjixhhffjjhdhhggdhxuixkcjhjjhdggxghxhhhdhxjjxxudkxxjcjcjjxkkxn xxnxnxmxmjxcnbv

Corinne Ininahazwe someone guide this blind guy

There is a lot of nice stuff out there on VHS, that never made it to DVD, so yeah I understand you :p

@@FrightfulAccountant true. I still need to track some of those super rare 70s & 80s horror vhs.

scaryboi me too and recently my VCR stopped playing them. I think the head finally died on it 😒 it saddens me

@@mad_quack oh no! If you have a goodwill or thrift store near by go see if they have any for sale.

@@FrightfulAccountant Indeed, and most VHS releases in Europe were usually also completely uncut... So many DVD releases of the same movies are horribly cut or censored, even when the box says "uncut", it really isn't compared to the VHS version, especially not for horror movies. You took a wise decision in keeping the VHS collection (sadly, i was stupid enough to sell most of mine in the mid 00s, before i started to really notice how many scenes were missing from the DVD releases). Also in my opinion, nothing can beat old slashers on VHS, no matter what...the sound, even if it's supposedly worse quality, just does em so much more justice on VHS, and defects/gltiches just add to the atmosphere (same goes for the blurry picture, there's just something to it).

PAL is a little higher quality than NTSC.

vinnien Why do you have to mention that, exactly? Lots of people live in PAL regions. Is that supposed to explain your love for it?

and the chance is very high the cable between the vcr and tv was a RGB scart cable instead of composite.

Erik Bruijn Uhh, but the SCART still carried composite unless he lived in France.

nope, i'm from NL and even there scart had RGB (and I'm sure because I had a TV that indicated it's receiving a RGB signal.)

Capacitance Electronic Disk

Unless you saw the movie in theaters.

Exactly

Are you all special? Those formats (except for BetaMax) were rarely used in comparison to VHS. BetaMax could have been better quality than VHS had Sony used larger cassettes with more tape that would have allowed them to use the Beta 1 speed, but that speed was removed from most BetaMax VCRs by the early 80s. Thus, BetaMax was equal in quality (except for the ability to have somewhat better color and sharper background images) to VHS. U-Matic, another Sony format, was primarily and almost exclusively used for broadcasts. They were incredibly rare VCRs in regards to being used for home video purposes. CED, on the other hand, was unbelievably minuscule in the market, which is why it was discontinued in the mid 80s. Ask almost 99.5% or more of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and Generation X and you’ll find that they will have never even heard the word “CED”. Not to mention the fact that NONE of those formats are HD.

Ben Jones I’ve been recording to VHS recently and it’s not even that bad.

Daniel Hikkamorii that's why it was derisively nicknamed Never The Same Color. The engineers had to do a lot of trickery to get color to fit in the existing signal specification and it suffered for it. I believe the European standards (PAL/SECAM) were built from the ground up for color and thus can mix chroma and luma better than NTSC.

Super Smash Dolls I know that, just think that needs to be mentioned.

Et ouais! french invention Bitch! :p Tu peux pas test!

PAL/SECAM still use the same bandwidth which B/W and NTSC uses, but they really were designed after finding out NTSC problems and they were resolved in rather tricky way. The main signal is luminosity in all of color formats and there are two "color difference" signals. In NTSC they were coded simultaneously using "quadrature modulation" and because of radio interference they often ended mixed up. In SECAM only one color diff. signal is transmitted at time. For example, odd lines have "blue minus lum" while even lines have "red minus lum". Each TV set has ultrasonic delay line which in fact stores one of these signals, so each line have all 3 needed. That way horizontal resolution of colors is 2 times less than of luminance, but that's OK, it's the way human eye percepts them. PAL is a little more tricky, it actually uses quadrature modulation as NTSC does, but it rotates phase 180 degrees from line to line, thus its name: Phase Alternating Line! Some stupid TV sets decoded signal "on the fly", while the better ones used the same ultrasonic delay line to store previous line, so the two could be averaged and this way most of artefacts are gone, but resolution is still reduced by factor 2. Oh, the sweet times, building PAL/SECAM converters :)

Mostly correct. Both PAl and NTSC used quadrature modulation. PAL rotated the phase, and you are correct the resolution of the chroma signal is reduced. The big limiting factor on NTSC was the placement of the sound subcarrier. For years I had a big C band satellite dish, and would receive the broadcast NTSC signals (with the sound at 6.2 and 6.8MHz and the resolution was superior. I used a good monitor with a comb filter for color separation, and never saw all those bleeding colors that people with crappy cable TV did.

VHS was bad comparing to regular TV broadcasting. And here in Europe we had PAL format which had better resolution and didn't mess the colors like NTSC format did, so that plus a nearly crystal clear broadcast makes it a lot different than any consumer grade vhs tape. I also remember that live broadcasts were the best quality, clear as hell, because it was a direct signal from camera and not a recorded one.

regular t.v. format sucked ass back then especially if you had a crap cable company. Channels were all fuzzy and would go off and on alot. a rented VHS tape was Crystal clear compared to that

Don't forget there was a satellite option as well, and by regular TV broadcasting I meant a signal from regular antenna. By the way we still have analog broadcasting in our country and it is as clear as it was back in the day. Well, maybe a bit more clear, because the quality of cameras and storage mediums increased drastically, so basically I don't see the difference between digital and analog signal at PAL resolution at all at this point. Of course there is a difference between channels, some are really fuzzy, but main channels always had the best picture quality.

Perihelion74 - Agreed! Same applies for the video game industry.

Imagine what you will think of todays tech 30 years from now.

schmidty im with you all the way there, every Friday night was horror night and we used to go to the local rental store be it Pharoes or Apollo and oder a rental, loved the choice loved the anticipation.

...wandering the store on a Friday night, hunting for something to watch because all the new releases are gone.

And watching the older movies. I recently watched North By NorthWest. Amazed at how good of a movie that was.

I seriously miss rental stores, especially the cool local ones with all the hard to find stuff.

- That special smell - Ah, just nostalgic